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Women are about to storm yet another all-male bastion. With the Pentagon's decision to end the ban on women in combat, the video game industry must face the fact that combat is longer a male preserve.

In fact, it hasn't been for years, as women fly Apache helicopters into combat and accompany patrols in Afghanistan. But you couldn't tell by the many popular military-themed games, where the soldier-character that the player controls is almost always male. "In the video and computer games that feature soldiers or military-style combat, such as Halo, Call of Duty, SOCOM, and Battlefield, the majority of the characters people can choose to play are male characters, and often white male characters," says CarrieLynn Reinhard, an assistant professor at Dominican University, and author of the Playing with Research blog. "This tendency has largely been due to two reasons: the audience for such games here in America is typically male, and many of these games are trying to reflect historical military campaigns and styles, which until today have also been male dominated."

It's not that women are never portrayed as warriors. Despite the lack of subtlety in how Lara Croft's most prominent attribute is displayed, at least she is eye candy that kicks butt. "You can find female characters in action games and fighting games, such as Mortal Kombat, D.O.A. and Virtual Fighter," Reinhard says. "And you will sometimes find female characters in a soldier capacity in Japanese video games, but those tend to be influenced by Japanese anime and manga, which also tend to feature women more in a combat role."

However, in action games where the character controlled by the player is a current or former soldier, the character is usually male. There could be a few reasons for this. One reason might be the expense of adding female characters to the software. A more plausible explanation is that players and designers of shooter games are mostly male.

However, the most likely reason for the lack of female video game soldiers is simple realism. While shooter games have not exactly been lauded for their faithful depiction of actual combat, a game where the player is a female Delta Force commando or tank commander would be fiction. Even though there are about 700 female U.S. Air Force pilots, they are only 5 percent of the Air Force's 14,000 pilots. This misrepresentation is already a problem in action movies and TV shows, where the Special Forces or SWAT teams always have a kickboxing, sharpshooting female whose regulation uniform happens to be a low-cut camouflage t-shirt.

Despite the change in Pentagon policy, it still remains to be seen how receptive the military will be to placing women in combat roles, especially elite units like Rangers, SEALs and Army Special Forces. There may be a backlash triggered by complaints that the military has compromised standards, especially physical standards, in the name of political correctness. Yet bullets don't care about gender. The reality is that women are already boots on the ground, such as the Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan. Even if those jobs are not supposed to be combat-oriented, there are no front lines in the guerrilla wars that are today's conflicts. Many female soldiers run as great a risk of being shot as their male comrades. In that sense, video games are behind the times.

All of this raises two questions. The first is whether video games should now incorporate female soldiers as playable characters. Will it matter to an overwhelmingly male audience whether their avatars have big tits instead of big muscles? Having female characters in a game as eye candy is one thing, but some male players may not feel comfortable controlling GI Jane instead of GI Joe. Will game designers and publishers be willing to make the change?

The real question will be how video games will portray women soldiers. If all a character does is gun down terrorists or other players, then it may not matter. But if the game has a plot line and gives the player-character a personality, motives and desires, should a female soldier behave differently than a man? Should she be as ruthless and violent? Today's military presents itself as a fighting force of warriors where gender isn't as important as competence, and yet one of the beauties (and frustrations) of life is that men and women are different. It remains to be seen whether gamers will desire to see the difference.